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pain and pure sensation, she would not care. The life she would miss would be no reward so great as this.
    Then it started, the tight, hot spiral between her folds, and she canted her hips forward, pushing into the bed, trying desperately to ease the ache. In a moment, Esau’s hand was there, wriggling between her body and the mattress, seeking out her nub, stiff and enflamed with her desire. He stroked her only briefly before her crisis took her and a gush of wet bathed his hand and the bedclothes beneath.
    She heard his shout, though not the word he spoke, as he pulled roughly from her. Something fell, hot and heavy, like beads of quicksilver across her buttocks, and he sagged on top of her, their skin sticking together with sweat and his seed.
    How long they stayed like that, ridiculously propped against the edge of the bed, she could not say. Her knees trembled but she could not summon the strength to move, and to move Esau besides. When he did raise his head and leaned away from her, she slid boneless to the floor. She sat there, blinking up at him, his belly still smeared with the evidence of his climax, and they laughed.
    He helped her to her feet, murmuring things she could not hear, but when she asked him to repeat them, he shook his head and told her they weren’t important. If anyone else had said so, she would have been offended. It seemed it was always unimportant for her to know things that had been said. With Esau, she could tell he was uncomfortable with silence and spoke only for himself to hear. That endeared him to her more than perhaps it should have. Her heart clenched around the threat of coming emptiness, warning her away from such feelings.
    With the sponge from the washstand, Esau cleaned them both off, then helped her into bed, drawing the covers over her. She caught his wrist and tugged him down, and he looked torn for a moment. She knew he had a room upstairs, in the attic with the other servants. Would he seek his own bed tonight and forsake hers?
    “Stay,” she pleaded. He didn’t flinch from her ugly voice and she could have kissed him for it. But that seemed an intimacy too far for their agreement. She would have him in her body and sleep with him in her bed, but to kiss him when they weren’t in intimate congress would be a dangerous thing.
    He lay beside her and pushed the duvet off him. The heat of his body and the sweat from his exertion still stood out on his skin, but she’d just had his warm body covering her and now she shivered without him. She nestled against his side and closed her eyes, inching her fingers through the coarse hair on his chest.
    She kept her eyes closed. Behind their lids, she could be truly alone. She could pretend not to hear if someone spoke, though the slow rise of his chest told her he likely slept already. Her own body, completely satiated, pulled her toward sleep as well, but she fought against it. She had only a little freedom left before her ship sailed for France. She didn’t want to waste too much of it in sleep.
    Her frown moved her lips against his skin. There was danger here too, in lying beside him. Was it her feelings for Jude, those tricky, unresolved things, that made her want to be as close as possible to Esau, to want to climb inside him, were it possible, and become a part of him? They had to be responsible, for it made no sense otherwise. She’d chosen Esau for his differences to Jude, and in the end it had not mattered.
    Or perhaps it was just the loneliness she’d felt since that first rejection, when Jude had refused her a kiss on her birthday four long years ago. She had been so certain that he wanted her. She had seen her mother warning Father, before they’d realized her talent for reading speech, that Jude looked too long at their daughter, that he watched her when she was unaware. “No impropriety,” Mother had said, her expression a mingle of hope and parental wariness. She did not want Jude to take advantage, did not want